It's funny because reducing load times by 70% is almost certainly worth way more than $10k if calculated.

I can see both sides of this.

On one side, yeah - the work he did will be worth a lot more than $10k to Rockstar. They've had lots of people complain about & stop playing GTA online because of the slow loading times. And this issue would probably never be found or fixed otherwise.

On the other hand, he did it for fun (without any expectation of reward). $10k isn't massive and we can quibble over the reward amount, but its delightful that companies are rewarding people at all for fixes like this. A few years ago he'd be lucky to get sent a GTA t-shirt. Its definitely the right direction we should be moving in - bug bounties are a thing in security, and we should be celebrating any movement toward rolling them out in other circumstances.

And also they have to balance out internal politics as well. Putting massive incentives on the discovery of bugs could really mess up the motivations of internal staff.

Indeed there were stories on that previous thread of people being banned for 'hacking' when they've pointed out flaws to game developers

> On the other hand, he did it for fun

This might be an argument for him to console himself (or just keep smiling) in the event that he received nothing. It isn't a valid consideration for Rockstar, which should take heed of the calculus you stated with your first hand only, because for the beneficiary of a windfall, karma awaits.

If some engineer at Rockstar had done this work, they would have gotten their regular salary and probably not much else, which probably would have worked out to less than $10k for the amount of time spent on this issue.

And yet, in practice, none of the engineers at Rockstar has done this work in 7 years and a half. I do not believe that it is fair to value *a posteriori* a one-million-dollar fix with "if" sentences.

Let us spin it differently: contact Rockstar before publishing the details of the fix, and offer to help them on this issue. How much do you believe that Rockstar would value the fix *a priori*?

The truth is this kind of fix is worth a lot, but it is always tempting for the company to be penny-pinching (and come up with justifications for being so) after the fact.

Engineers don't get to work on whatever they want (usually). The described problem doesn't stop people buying shark cards, the fix is not new content and players leaving the game because of it don't affect the bottom line significantly. This could be why the priority was low and why you should prioritise tech debt

> none of the engineers at Rockstar has done this work in 7 years and a half.

Its probably because some project manager would have told the engineer who wanted to fix this that its not important.

A Rockstar employee would have had access to the source code probably. Running a profiler would have taken them significantly less time than the author.

Further, a Rockstar employee would just isolate the parser, feed json files, graph processing times and look in awe to the resulting plot.

Yeah but to be fair, that's what he's actually supposed to be doing.

As a company that's technically true. As an individual engineer they would probably have been sneaking time to work on it and have to be a pet project of someone senior enough to get it merged and released.

not really, there's a lot of great work i could have been doing on my past projects that wasn't a management priority

The author also publicly mocked them and forced their hand in changing 7 years old code. They didn't even mention this $10k reward in their PR issue.